Last week, my colleague Aria Alamalhodaei wrote an exclusive on defense and space tech venture firm Countdown Capital’s plan to shut down.
But Countdown shutting down is likely more of an isolated event than a sign of what’s to come for micro funds this year.
That’s changed today, and it isn’t surprising given the sheer amount of capital it takes to get defense startups off the ground; the costs are incomparable to a category like SaaS.
This is also why Countdown’s fate doesn’t portend cloudy skies for micro funds in other categories.
So despite the category heating up, a $500,000 check can still net a firm meaningful ownership at the pre-seed stage, they said.
The Amazon-owned livestreaming platform will cut 35% of its staff, or roughly 500 employees, Bloomberg reports, and will announce the reduction as early as this week.
Shortly after Twitch co-founder and longtime CEO Emmett Shear handed the reigns to its now-CEO Dan Clancy, the company laid off 400 employees.
Twitch faces steep operating costs to support livestream content at such a large scale.
In a 2022 blog post, Clancy stated that each high-volume streamer on Twitch costs the company about $1,000 per month, citing Amazon Web Service’s interactive video rates.
“Delivering high definition, low latency, always available live video to nearly every corner of the world is expensive,” Clancy wrote.
The questions and answers website nabbed $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which will be used to power the growth of Poe, Quora’s AI chat platform.
Even developers who integrate bots with the Poe AI are eligible to earn money.
“In the last two years, the market has changed substantially, driven by rising interest rates and higher cost of capital,” D’Angelo wrote.
“Excluding Poe, Quora is cash flow positive, so all of this new funding will be used on Poe,” D’Angelo said.
“Currently, Poe is one of the top 5 largest generative AI-related properties, and creators have built 1M+ bots on Poe the platform.”
ABL Space Systems is looking to raise up to $100 million in new funding, and has just closed over $40 million, according to a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
It’s the first indication that ABL has raised venture funding since October 2021, when the launch company closed $200 million at a $2.4 billion valuation.
Together, they’re meant to provide a mobile, all-in-one launch system.
However, the overall launch site layer represents a weak link.”Unsurprisingly, they argue that GS0 is the solution to this vulnerability, offering both a launch mount and a site system in a “proliferated” architecture.
“It was not in our plans to have RS1 grounded for most of 2023,” O’Hanley wrote after the launch.
Most tech startups are born from a few early engineers building the company’s initial product.
As those first builders work together, they begin to establish a developer culture — sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.
At Web Summit in Lisbon in November, two founders discussed the importance of building a developer culture that’s distinct from a company’s overall culture.
And we really wanted to instill that in the developer culture early on,” she said.
Ludmila Pontremolez, CTO and co-founder at Zippi, a Brazilian fintech startup, spent time as an engineer at Square prior to launching Zippi.
Once again, Etsy’s layoffs come as no surprise Junkification and fierce competition paint a tough path aheadRemember when we wrote that Spotify’s latest layoffs make sense?
Well, we feel the same about Etsy’s announcement that it would lay off 11% of its workforce.
This is not us being callous with employees affected by these layoffs, or making excuses for what led the NASDAQ-listed marketplace to that point and what could perhaps have been prevented.
We are just saying that this isn’t much of a surprise.
But more than quantitative, Etsy’s challenge is qualitative.
